Dear first year students!

So, a little advice to you about how to study when you have a laptop in front of you at all times. I'm not going to tell you not to use facebook or msn in class. I mean, we all used it and I guess we have turned out OK =) So the best advice I can give you is to check facebook, VG and so on first thing each morning, then you're done when the teacher is actually ready to start the class. Having your own laptop at school is pretty great! The opportunities are endless. I would especially advise you to use the program OneNote! It's great for organizing your notes and will help you a lot when you take your exam. It certainly helped me!
So just use your head and do the things you are expected to do, and things will be great! Good luck at Sandvika VGS and enjoy yout time here;)

American Gangsters

Sitting in class, reading the factual text "Gangland, USA" about the extensiveness of gangs in the US, one thing made me think. The Medias way of portraying gangsters and their life is in fact quite special. From being a group with a bad reputation and violent members, the gangsters in the US have become extremely popular. If you turn on MTV at any time during the day you will in most cases, within the time lap of about 10 minutes, see a music video portraying the glamorous life of a gangster. And sure, this affects youth.

There is no secret that many children in the US, and other places in the world for that matter, don’t have the life they deserve. They are living with problems at home, have the wrong friends, the school system is failing them. These children are left to fight their own battle and become open for new ways of living. The solution for many is turning to drugs and gangs. Here they find a family who cares and have their backs. The fact that it’s illegal and dangerous I don't really think matters to these young people. Many of them have been neglected since they were born and don't really know any other way of making a life for themselves.

So in what way do the media help encourage young people to get involved with this type of lifestyle? Well, as mentioned, music videos are an important factor. We all know that mixing sound and image is one of the strongest ways of convincing. For children, finding themselves to be quite easy influenced, the media has a lot of control. The way of talking, dressing, walking and so on in music videos is being picked up by the young children and they are taking it out on the streets in their hometowns. The superstars on MTV maybe with this, helping to increase the ratio of gangsters in the US. They make it look great to live the gangster lifestyle with fast cars, beautiful women and a lot of "bling". But it's important to remember that not all famous people help sell the gangster lifestyle to kids. In the video clip below you see a clip from the group "The Game"s single "House of Pain. Here we get to see a different side of the gangster life that show the true colors of being a gangster.

The Edublogger's Student Competition.

"What difference has blogging made to your life at school and home e.g. how has it changed how you learn, the challenges of blogging and how teachers might make the process easier"

Well, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical to start blogging at school. I really couldn't see the leaning benefit and got a bit cranky. So I went in to this whole thing kind of halfhearted and not really enthusiastic. Now on the other hand, I have another opinion. Blogging is good to get variety during the school day. Especially at my school were we only have one subject each day. So during five hours of English, it's good to have different things do to! When it comes to the learning benefit I can actually see it now;) Posting things on our blogs where other people actually can read it, makes you want to do it well and look over your grammar once more. Of course it's hard to always find out what to write, I mean all topics aren't that exiting, but I guess that's just school, with or without blogging! Our teacher is pretty good at commenting on our blogs and that makes it more fun to post new things because we know she actually reads it!

I don't think blogging has made a difference in my life at home. I don't blog about other things than schoolwork, but maybe in the future I will make a personal blog, blogging about things I really care about.

Parliaments in Britain

The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom and British overseas territories. Is alone has parliamentary sovereignty, conferring it ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and its territories. At its head is the Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth ІІ.

The parliament is bicameral, which means that they have two houses. An upper house – the House of Lords, and a lower house – the House of Commons. The Queen is the third component of Parliament. The House of Lords includes three different types of members: the Lords Spiritual (the senior bishops of the Church of England), the Lords Temporal (members of the Peerage, a part of the British honor system) and Law Lords (judges that carry out the House of Lords’ judicial responsibilities). All members of the House of Lords are not elected by the population at large, but are appointed by the Queen on advice of the Prime Minister. The members of the House of Lords are often called Peers and there are now 750 Peers in the House of Lords.

The House of Commons is a democratically elected chamber. The people in the UK elect Members of Parliament (MPs) to represent their interests and proposing new laws. There are 646 Members of Parliament (MPs). Almost all belong to one of the ten political parties represented in Parliament. The three biggest parties at present, in order of size, are Labor, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. The leader of the party with the largest number of MPs is the Prime Minister who selects Members for their party to form Her Majesty’s Government. MPs split their time between working in Parliament itself, working in the constituency that elected them, and working for their political party. Some MPs from the ruling party become government ministers with specific responsibilities in certain areas, such as Health or Defense. The UK is divided into 646 areas called constituencies. During an election everyone eligible to cast a vote in a constituency (constituents) selects one candidate to be their MP. The candidate who gets the most votes becomes the MP for that area until the next election.

The Houses of Parliament, also known as the Palace of Westminster, is in the centre of London. As well as the home of the UK Parliament, it is also a royal palace and former residence of great kings. The Palace comprises many famous sites including the green-colored House of Commons Chamber and the red-colored House of Lords Chamber where political decisions are made to this day. It also includes the famous Clock Tower, popularly known as Big Ben.

Northern Ireland

In 1170 Ireland became the first English colony and during Henry VIIIs reign (1507-1547) all of Ireland was controlled by England. In 1610 Scottish Protestants began settling in Northern Ireland. In 1916 the Easter Rising found place, where the Irish republicans wanted home rule, and this marked the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. The war of independence in Ireland ended with a truce on 11 July 1921. The conflict had reached a stalemate. In 1922 the Island was divided into an Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The Irish Free State was not completely independent though, the British crown still had power. In 1937 the Irish Free State became totally independent and was now a republic; Republic of Ireland.

The Irish Civil War started in June 1922 and lasted until May 1923. The War was a direct consequence of the creation of the Irish Free State. That's because the Irish Free State Army supported the agreement that divided Ireland. The IRA was opposed to the agreement. The war was in the end won by the Free State Army. For a long time there have been problems between the Catholics and the Protestants. The Irish were Catholics, but the English and Scottish who settled in Northern Ireland were Protestants. Here the Irish Catholics were poor and suppressed by the Protestants.

Today there are 60% Protestants in the Northern Ireland, most of who feel they belong to the UK. Of the 40% Catholics most feel they should be independent from the UK/ be part of the Republic of Ireland.

Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson really surprised me. I have to admit, I didn't really have high hopes to his presentation. How fun can really school as a topic be for someone who just can't wait to finish. But I actually found his presentation quite interesting. That he uses humor to underline what he's saying is of course helping! So, what did he say? Well, people are creative. This is probably best shown by children who are not afraid to be wrong. Ken says "you have to be prepared to be wrong to come up with something original". And I think his right. School systems around the world teach children that being wrong is one of the worst things you can be. They stigmatize mistakes.

The fact that no school system teaches creative subjects such as dance on a daily or weekly basis makes the kids learn from the head up. In a few years more people than ever will be graduating university, the problem is that degrees won't be worth much. We'll get academic inflation. The thing is, everything he says is trough. Mathematics and literacy have always been valued more than drawing or other creative subjects at school. And the higher up you get in the school system, the more it focuses on you head. Well, one thing that I'm pretty sure he's got right is the fact that creativity is becoming more and more important. Companies, big businesses and most important, the world, need people who can produce original ideas that are worth something. Simply, the school systems have to start valuing these kinds of abilities because it's these thoughts we need in the future if we want to keep moving forward. 

This is England

In 2006 the film "This is England" hit the movieteathers. We meet 12 year old Shaun living in England in 1983. Shaun lost his father in the Falklands War, and feeling sad on the way home from school one day, he meets a group of skinheads. Shaun eventually gets accepted as a member of the group. When the group splits in two, one racist group and one non-political group, Shaun decides to stay with the racist group. Shaun becomes a member under the leadership of Combo, an exprisoner, who wants to promote white nationalist views. Like many skinheads, Combo has been recruited by the National Front, an openly racist right-wing political party, and soon the gang begins to fracture, with Combo taking one faction toward violence and petty crime against blacks, Indians, and Pakistanis, while Woody, the leader of the other group, and his friends follow a more benign path. As Combo's gang harass the local ethnic minorities, the course is set for a rite of passage that will hurl Shaun from innocence to experience.


The Falklands War started on 2 April 1982 with the Argentine invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and ended with the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982. The conflikt was the result of a protracted diplomatic confrontation regarding the sovereignty of the islands. Neither state officially declared war and the fighting was largely limited to the territories under dispute and the South Atlantic. The initial invasion was considered by Argentine as the re-occupation of its own territory, and by the UK as an invasion of a British overseas territory.

Britain launched a naval task force to engage the Argentine Navy and Argentine Air Force, and retake the islands by amphibious assault. After combat resulting in 258 British and 649 Argentine deaths, the British eventually prevailed and at the end of combat operation on 14 June the islands remained under British control.